In June, 1995, an Amarillo, Texas, district
court judge, ruling in a custody suit, accused Martha Laureano of child abuse
for speaking Spanish to her five-year-old daughter. Judge Samuel C. Kiser
ordered the mother to speak only English to the girl, who is entering
kindergarten this Fall. He warned that English was necessary for her daughter
to “do good in school.” Even worse, the judge added, without English the girl
would be condemned to a life as a maid.

When the story broke at the end of August,
there was a national outcry against this overreaching and misdirected decision.
Judge Kiser, sensing that some fence-mending might be appropriate, apologized
to maids. But he held resolutely to his English-only order.

The judge's mastery of English grammar is
not the issue here. Nor are the obvious free-speech concerns of the case or
that fact that the judge's equation of Spanish with child abuse draws attention
away from the serious forms of abuse that do warrant legal intervention.
Instead I want to focus on Judge Kiser's practice of a very traditional
American form of language abuse.

For many years, young speakers of Spanish,
Navajo, Chinese, and other minority languages in this country were beaten,
humiliated, or given detentions if they used their first language in classrooms
or on the schoolyard. Such punishments did not accelerate the students'
adoption of English. As the average student chafing under a language
requirement will attest, you can't make someone speak a “foreign” language.
Physical force and corporal punishment do even less to secure linguistic
compliance.

Nor can you effectively stop someone from speaking
a language. After the United States entered World War I, anti-German language
laws swept the nation. The governor of Iowa issued a proclamation forbidding
the use of any foreign language in public: on trains, on the streets, at
meetings, in religious services, even on the telephone, then a more public
instrument than it is now. During the same wave of xenophobia, a teacher in a
Lutheran private school was fined twenty-five dollars for having his students
sing German hymns during the school day, in violation of a Nebraska law
forbidding foreign-language instruction. This case led to the U. S. Supreme
Court decision, Meyer v. Nebraska, overturning a number of state laws that
blocked the teaching of foreign languages.

From time to time legislators concerned that
not enough English was being spoken in the land have proposed making English
the official language of the United States. In 1923 the State of Illinois made
"American" its official language (in 1969 the law was quietly amended
to make English the official tongue). The state language was symbolic, like the
state bird or flower. The Illinois official language law, like Judge Kiser's
decree, caused no one to speak English or abandon another language.

Nonetheless, with time non-English speakers
in this country do switch to English. Social pressure accomplishes what
punishment, sanctions, laws and required courses do not: the children of
minority-language speakers have typically become bilingual, and in turn theirchildren tend to speak only English.
Some pro-English advocates claim that while this may have been true earlier,
today's minority-language users are different. Maybe so. But there are also
some indications that the familiar three-generation pattern of shifting to
English is being abridged. Today many of the children of immigrants are
becoming English-only speakers, skipping the bilingual state altogether. In the
Amarillo case, Martha Laureano spoke Spanish to her daughter in the hope that
she would become bilingual. She knew it was inevitable that the child would
acquire English; she only hoped the girl would retain some of her Spanish.

American
minority-language communities have learned over the past two centuries that
despite their best efforts to preserve their culture, their children will abandon
the parents' language in favor of English. There is a cruel irony here.
American society urges immigrants to give up their native tongue and then
bemoans the fact that a hopelessly monolingual America cannot compete
effectively in the international marketplace. Surely there is a more efficient
and more humane way to deal with the boundless linguistic creativity and
flexibility of children than Judge Kiser's ruling would allow.

Dennis Baron is professor of English and
linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.